Forest Fire
by the Darkdesire
Summary: Alone and wandless, Hermione and Draco are lost in the dark forest. What hunts them, haunts them and has a plan greater than what either of them could envision.


**Forest fire**

**Summary: **Alone and wandless, Hermione is stuck with the lovely prick, Malfoy. Unless their enmity turns into unity, they stand no chance of surviving what lurks in the forest.

**A/N: **Admittedly this was inspired by God of the Lost (Gravidy), a fic I will forever remember as an inspiration to all my writing. And of course, none of the characters or the Harry Potter universe are mine-they're all the work of the great JK Rowling (who lost her billionaire status because she donated so much to charity-much respect).

**Beta:** I really need a beta (so I apologize in advance for any spelling or grammatical errors in my writing) so if anyone could spare some time to edit incoming chapters that would be much appreciated! Please message me if you're interested.

Enjoy!

**Chapter 1:**

Hermione rocked on the balls of her feet impatiently, her thumbs hooked into her overalls. Yes, she was wearing overalls. Ginny had for years, despaired over her friend's lack of fashion sense and finally Hermione had given in. Apparently she should have held off for a little longer because her red headed friend was going through a phase that involved large bright patterns, suspenders and anything that would decidedly make Hermione cringe. So the brunette found herself dressed in suspenders, green high waisted pants and a patterned shirt filled with big blue flowers on a white background. The shirt was magically enhanced so all the flowers swayed whenever a light breeze flowed around her.

Harry and Ron had been very sympathetic towards their victimized friend for her predicament, having also been on the receiving end of Ginny's attention at one point or another. Speaking of those two…where were they? The golden brothers were late as usual, probably having lost themselves within the maze of a quidditch store once again. Hermione spotted Malfoy coming down the alleyway and she hid her face, hoping to be ignored. Alas, the blond monstrosity had eyes only for her.

"Well, if isn't my favorite muddy brunette," She rolled her eyes.

"How have you been Malfoy?"

"Well until I saw you," He smiled.

"And why are you talking to me in that case?" She was so sick of these petty little games. Next would come some small taunt, after which her response or lack thereof would result in something even more aggressive until it culminated into a full blown fight. Malfoy was such a petulant child.

To aoid the entire scenario, Hermione turned around and began walking towards the exit. Just as she was about to pass the archway that guarded the alleyway, she hit an invisible wall.

Drawing her wand, she spun around immediately, sensing a trap. Draco however, stared back at her, just as shocked, staring at her sudden wand in his face.

His eyes narrowed but she had already withdrawn her wand, apologizing light heartedly.

"Mudblood, if you wanted a secret make out session, you need only ask," He directed towards her before forging a couple of simple curses. As suspected, it didn't work.

"A barrier spell" She stated the obvious.

"HELLO? HEY! HELP WE'RE STUCK!" No one in the multitude of people walking by the alley responded to her call.

"Alright genius, how do we get out?" Draco turned to her expectantly. It always surprised her that in a time of crisis, everyone looked to her for answers and whether or not it was time to start panicking.

"It's an old spell," She stated. Old was the keyword in this case because it wasn't complicated but was very effective, as most old, base spells were.

"You see that white chalk like substance there?" Hermione pointed to a powdery white substance fashioned into a line at the entrance to the archway. "It's a boundary spell coupled with a silencing charm. The only way out is by merely running out of the exit."

He snorted, "Did you not just try doing that?"

"I just tried walking. It has to be enough force to break the barrier. In fact, I think that it might need both of us to run simultaneously to break the spell."

"Let's get it over with. I'm finding it difficult to breathe what with you tainting the air here."

She sighed deeply with half a mind to blow his head to bits before escaping.

"Let's take a running start," They walked several paces behind the exit and counted, "One…Two…Three"

000

Hermione groaned as she got up. Her body ached where her shoulder had crashed into the barrier. She lay tangled on something…or someone. Startled, she raised her head just as Malfoy groaned awake. Pushing herself off of him, she stabilized herself with a tree. There was a sudden urge to relieve herself of her breakfast but she kept it in, barely.

Malfoy groaned loudly once again, barely managing to get on his knees before throwing up a portion of his stomach contents.

"Where are we," the blond groaned from his position on the ground. "Diagon alley," indignation accompanied her voice as she struggled to keep the food at bay, her eyes closed.

"No you twit, we're not"

When she regained her composure, Hermione opened her eyes and gasped at her surroundings. Trees. Trees everywhere. Where on earth were they.

"Forest"

"Would you quit stating the obvious and actually think?" He hissed at her, losing his temper as usual.

"I'm not sure…" She gazed at the abundance in the forest. It was clearly an old forest as the trees were several meters high causing only a thin layer of light to enter the forest. It was hard to tell what time it was and how long they had been asleep but bright enough to see and know that it was still daytime.

The trees grew in concentric circles and the trees in a given circle had interconnected roots.

_Truvian_ Parsillus.

Hermione gasped, a sudden epiphany of epic proportions hitting her. "I know where we are!" Malfoy started at her expectantly. When she didn't respond, he snapped, "Well are you going to tell me or not?" "Oh yes….I posit that we are in the dark forest!" It seemed plausible. He still wanted an explanation. He who asks the question, stays in power. Malfoy 101. It was also a technique to stay in power during interrogations. "And why do you say that?" Hermione sighed. It was so typical of Malfoy not to put two and two together.

"Well…it makes sense. For whatever reason, we have been transported, probably by a portkey to this location. Portkeys are strong enough to allow groups of people to migrate from one place to another but they do not allow us to travel long distances. So if we were in Hogsmeade then we must be nearby. The only magical forest nearby is the dark forest. It's clearly a magical forest."

When he didn't respond, she continued excitedly," The trees you see have grown in concentric circles and are connected together through an extensive root system. This is characteristic of _Truvian _Parsillus.

Magical trees. Well, they aren't magical. They are just indigenous to magical forest. They could survive in other areas as well but they take several years or even centuries to grow this tall so this is likely an ancient forest. And the only ancient, magical forest I know of in the vicinity is…the dark forest! I know this because I've calculated this extensively and used to often travel by portkey since apparition is prohibited at Hogwarts." That was impressive but he remained impassive.

"And why don't our wands work properly?"

"What?" She looked confused. He snorted.

"You're seriously dense Granger," She gawked at that retort. It was typical of Malfoy to disregard the last history lesson of information she just imparted and to insult her anyway.

"The first thing I did was try to apparate. When that didn't work, I tried to accio a broom." She frowned, not realizing how quick Malfoy was on his feet.

"She pulled out her wand and tried a transformation spell on a leaf. She had transformed a great number of items in her years of schooling but she seemed to have trouble with even a simple leaf to leaf butterfly spell. The spell didn't even require full molecular transformation. The leaf did mold but it looked more like an amoeba in the end than a butterfly.

"Well…I guess the further you get into the forest, the greater the magic." He frowned. That made absolutely no sense.

"Granger, get your head out of your arse and explain it properly to me." He said slowly, highly irritated at her jumps in logic. He didn't appreciate being the stupider one.

"Magic…well the history of magic is really quite fascinating. In the ancient times, as silly as this sounds," She giggled as if she were departing a great joke, "wizards would-"

"I don't want a fucking history lesson bint, I want the answer," Draco snapped, his patience wearing thin. Just watching the dirty creature talk like she was his equal or his superior was ingratiating and he already had an incredibly short fuse when it came to Granger. She squawked indignantly but gave him what he wanted, his answer. "Well…long story _short, _magic is believed to have originated in forests such as this one and were quarantined in them until they eventually either seeped out or something akin to that, there are several theories, and it became distributed among other areas that didn't have magical forests. As a result, wands were used as conduits, to channel the rarified magic into a concentrated form for manipulation. So wizards are manipulators of the magic that already exists in the atmosphere. Muggles cannot even activate a wand…I wonder if they could access magic in a forest such as this one," she began to wander off topic once again, gazing into the densely wooded area behind her.

"Ok but why can't we use our wands as conduits here? Why aren't they working properly if this is a magical forest?" He questioned.

"I'm not sure…I'm assuming it's like hmm…" she pulled out her wand and began examining it. "Can I see your wand?"

"Fuck no," He snapped, immediately on guard.

"Come on Malfoy, what am I going to do? Break it with my muggle hands?" She said narrowing her eyes.

"Maybe," He said but conceded and handed her the wand, "If you do anything to it, I'll break your fat little nose"

She rolled her eyes, "Like how I broke yours in third year," she quipped as she grabbed his wand. He growled, that was still a sore point for him. Bested by a mudblood. He had actually obliviated Crabbe and Goyle of that memory. Actually, he had to obliterate several memories until he got to the right one. They were missing a week's worth of memories by the time he was done but their reputation for being mentally disabled preceded them and no one took notice of their considerable memory lapse.

"Yep…I was right," She stated, pulling the blond out of his reverie.

"Must I ask every damn time what you've discovered mudblood?" He hissed, incredibly annoyed.

She frowned but continued, avoiding a conflict at all costs.

"Well…as you know, wands act as a conduit. Olivander always insisted that it is the wand that picks the wizard and often when you use another's wand, it is difficult to manipulate the magic. The reason is because wands have a certain capacity…kind of like an electrical conductor," She considered abandoning the electricity example but Malfoy, having taken mandatory muggle studies classes, was following her thought process intently, "Copper conducts a different level of heat or electricity than iron or mercury. Similarly, a wand has different levels of concentration based on the magical ability of a wizard. The wand capacity is written on the bottom of the wand. That's what I was checking. A wizard can improve their skills in the manipulations of magic but cannot gain more power unless by unnatural means. That means they can only concentrate a certain amount of energy or magic. That's why there are naturally strong wizards like Dumbledore and other capable but weaker wizards," She omitted saying that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was not particularly strong if he had to resort to horcruxes to hoard power. But she suspected she'd be on the receiving end of something incredibly nasty or upsetting if she mentioned that.

"Such as yourself," Malfoy stated off handedly as if it were a common fact and not just a ludicrous, unsubstantiated opinion. She was both skilled and powerful and she had her own life as proof of that, having survived through the war.

She ignored his comment and continued, "So…in a magic packed forest such as this one, a wand is not only unnecessary, it's practically obsolete. It may be able to channel small portions of energy but it will be very hard to mold. If we used wandless magic, we would be able to use the abundant magic available but alas, we are both not very well averse in that art," After the war, wandless magic was only taught in post graduate studies because of fear that students may use it inappropriately. It was quite ridiculous but the ministry wasn't exactly composed of sane, logical people.

What Hermione didn't state was her mounting uncertainty that this was in fact the dark forest. If it were, they were very deep inside it because most of the creatures they had witnessed had neither made an appearance in any of Hagrid's classes nor had they been mentioned in any of her dark-forest text books that she'd read up on during her extensive stay at the Hogwarts library.

There was also the matter of being unable to use their wands. As she recalled, in her first year when Harry, Ron, herself and Draco had ventured into the dark forest, they had been able to use their wands despite being considerably deep inside the forest. She had used her wand once to partially subdue Hagrid's giant brother Grawp who had been hidden several kilometers into the forest to avoid discovery and capture. Keeping a giant quiet was an impossible task. "Well genius, how to we get out of here?" He looked at her expectantly and without missing a beat, Hermione provided the solution.

"We perform a simple direction spell and we can walk towards Hogsmeade or Hogwarts," She smiled daintily.

He snorted, "And what if we are so far away that we have to walk kilometers to reach either? What if we're on the other side?"

She frowned. That was an awfully good point and she appreciated Draco's full minded pessimism. "Well…we could perform a locating spell instead. We can search for the nearest….wand! Or something of that matter. Something small and man-made."

"Search for a broom," He commanded. She looked annoyed, the ferret sits around his arse and orders her around as if she were a servant.

"We can't. We need to use an object to locate a similar one. Making a spell is different than performing one with a wand," She sighed, realizing the difficulty of the situation. "Unless you have a broom on hand to dip into a mud potion, I suggest you leave the tracking to me.

000

Hermione had pulled out a cauldron from her expandable purse. She was happy to find a three month supply of toothpaste and body soap and a couple dozen crackers in it. She had prepared extensively after their expedition hunting for the elder wand the year before. She'd been paranoid of getting caught without supplies ever since.

The location potion was incredibly simple and she surmised based on the ingredients required to perform it, that it was a base spell, meaning that it was ancient and had been used to create other spells such as the person location spell (used in voodoo magic), the boundary spell and even the pregnancy spell. It was, what scholars categorized as 'earth magic' meaning that it required basic ingredients that would be easy to find in the wilderness or magical forests. The spell was primitive but easy to perform and effective.

It had required mud, water, leaves and a couple other simple ingredients before it was ready for the finale. In the end, much to Malfoy's chagrin, she had dropped his wand into the cauldron. If wands hadn't been near indestructible and they hadn't been severely desperate to get out, he would have objected but he ignored it because she needed hers for minor magical manipulations.

Hermione finally extracted the wand and levitated it using her own while chanting a very simple _lithmic_ verse.

She was undoubtedly pronouncing it incorrectly but pronunciations mattered very little in magical forests because the magical conduit, wands were not required. What she needed was concentration. Slowly, the want began to rotate as a compass would and pointed in the direction they would need to take.

Draco drew a line on the ground that they would follow, grabbed the wand and began marching.

000

"You better have done the spell correctly Granger," Draco growled, breaking their several hours of silence.

"I did, we're just really far from the closest wand," She snapped. She was hungry, her soles were aching and she had a sinking feeling of dread, that they were going the wrong way. They'd been walking for almost three days, eating nuts and drinking water from a small water bottle she kept in her expandable purse. Malfoy, as was expected, hogged most of the water and allowed her only a couple of sips. When she went to piss, she pulled out a second bottle of water from her expandable purse and quenched her thirst away from greedy-green-eyes.

"I'm beginning to really miss-"

"What? Beginning to miss your daddy already Malfoy?" She was becoming remarkably irritated.

He bared laughter. "Oh look, the muddy made a funny. No, I was going to say, that I'm beginning to miss the taste of fresh meat and if it takes too long, I might just feast on you."

She gave him a really confused look and he suddenly turned and lunged at her, barking and biting his teeth.

She yelped, startled at his sudden reaction. This caused uproarious laughter from the blond.

"Think of that. That would make quite a story in your book of tortures wouldn't it?"

"Pureblood contaminated by cannibalism," She frowned at his words. What kind of sicko was this? She didn't doubt that if push came to shove, Malfoy would shove without a moment's hesitation. He'd been bred and conditioned that way, selfish little misanthrope.

"So Muddy," He'd taken to calling her this after testing out several different names. This, she supposed, had suited his fancy because it had provoked an unintentional reaction from her. He also called her muddy-puddy, in reference to her belly fat. This name was even more unbearable but she had used a solid poker face so he had stuck to calling her Muddy.

"Ever fucked Potter or Weasel?" She looked up startled. What an indecent thing to say, the nasty little prick.

She ignored him, choosing instead to focus on the road.

"What? It's a genuine question. It's definitely crossed your mind hasn't it?"

"It had…many times in fact. Not the idea of being intimate of course but just the idea of being romantically involved. Her romantic involvement with Ron had been a total bust. It was like being involved with a rock. Yet it had hurt so very much when they had broken up, it had mostly hurt her ego although she allowed Ginny to nurse her wounds with other words of comfort.

"Lemme guess…No. Why? If it's diseases you're worried about…you probably can't cross contaminate yourselves."

He actually frowned and began to ponder that idea. "There are some diseases that are specific to only purebloods and mudbloods. I wonder if it can be transferred to mixed-bloods…"

He got no response from her but it did shock her that someone actually believed that different diseases could affect different types of people. Being magical was like having a certain blood type. It didn't prevent someone from mating with another and it most certainly didn't cause you to be suddenly immune to contagious diseases.

"Did you turn them down…or did they turn you down?"

She gifted him with a tilted smile. "I turned them down because you've clearly taken a fancy to both of them, and I wouldn't dare taint either with my dirty blood and come between you. The first thing you think about while we're in the forest is about fucking my best friends isn't it? Must be difficult what with both of them being thoroughly disgusted by your hideous demeanor"

He spun around, laughing angrily and grabbed her arm, twisting it until she screamed in pain. "I assure you, I do not fancy men and I most certainly do not fancy them. But", he leaned towards her, putting his face in her hair, "I do fancy young ladies". He took a deep breath and smelled her scented hair. She stiffened at the implications.

Laughing, he let her go. "No need to worry Granger, I'm not fascinated with the unfortunate breed of muggles."

And so it continued with taunts every time Malfoy grew bored or hungry. She began to walk several paces behind him or with several trees between them to avoid any confrontations. She kept her thoughts to herself and always reacted to his conversations head on to nip his taunts in a bud lest he act his anger out. She began to wear herself out, walking on egg shells with this man.

When they retired that night, Hermione made three rings of stones within their circle of tree roots for triple the protection. She placed a bit of salt only at the opening between the stones to cause a more effective barrier but felt that this was merely to make them feel better. She was afraid that this wasn't the dark forest and they weren't getting out that night or any other night. Just as they lay down to bed, she heard the deep throated hoot of an owl like creature, a Grey Dominion to be exact, in the darkness. A Dominion owl's hoot was reserved for mating and for warning of an approaching prey. She hoped it was mating season but even she knew she was just lying to herself.

000

Golden eyes peered into the crudely made circle. Padding around the edge of the bush surrounding the Truvian trees, it continued to gaze at the girl. She was smart, drawing a triple circle and adding a bit of salt. Entering was out of the question. The girl was smart, she would be delicious. It began to move excitedly at the thought of what her mind would feel like, what it would taste like. But the boy was shiny like a moon. It had been so long since it had eaten a moon colored one. The last one had tasted terrible but it was excited to try again. Which to consume first? In excitement it began to hoot loudly before calming down and finding a good place to burrow. The full moon was in a few days and full moon negated circles.


End file.
